


that we may find greater strength (in the beating of two wounded hearts)

by river_of_words



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Character Study, Comfort/Angst, Holding Hands, Introspection, Memories, Mild Injury To Self And Others but without the specific mindset that tends to come with Self-Harm, Not Canon Compliant, Other, Relationship Study, self-harm? i guess? sort of?, trying to wash the trauma off your hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26193238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: After the Master destroys Gallifrey, the Doctor takes him back to the Vault and washes the blood off his hands.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 43





	that we may find greater strength (in the beating of two wounded hearts)

**Author's Note:**

> i just needed some soft thoschei

They don’t communicate about where they need to go. Verbally or otherwise. The Doctor simply sets the coordinates and, when they land, the Master steps out of the Tardis to greet the Vault without question or surprise.

She avoids his eyes as she pushes past him and sonicks the doors. His gaze, like the damp air in the chamber, settles on her skin like the judgement of her conscience as he watches her meticulously unlock every lock and disarm every safety mechanism. Beeps and clicks granting access to memories as faithfully as they do to rooms.

The heavy doors swing open with the expectant air of an unamused parent who knew all along it was pillows beneath the blanket. They walk in like children. The air is still with shame and failure.

The Doctor takes a deep breath – shame and failure or pride and triumph, air is air and you have to breathe – and quietly takes the Master’s hand. She shepherds him without force, through the Vault where Time stands still, to the bathroom, and he lets her.

A muted click when she pulls the chord and with the warm, buzzing light, Time, too, floods the bathroom. They, with their pasts and futures, memories and imaginations, with the Time they have collected inside themselves since the last time they were here, are throwing stones in a frozen pond. Time gushes through the cracks and pools around their feet.

She sits him down on the edge of the bathtub, wine-dark silhouette against the backdrop of bone-white walls. The colour of his jacket does not make immediately obvious the amount of blood that is soaked into it. She undoes the buttons down his front and her fingers come away specked red. She wonders how he can breathe. She gently squeezes his fingers together to nudge his hand through his sleeve. When she pulls the jacket off of him, a thin stream of sand falls from it. From the sleeves, from the pockets, from the collar, from the seams. It feels like it will never stop.

But it does.

She puts the jacket in the bathtub.

The colour of his shirt still does not reveal anything about the carnage he has wrought. The stiffness of it, does. Ridges of thin, soft fabric, stuck together and dried, having been made hard and scratchy. Underneath, his skin is coated in it too. A layer of blood, dried and cracked, tugging at hair with every movement. She knows this. Knows it like every other thing he has shown how he hides from her. He offers, display as challenge. She accepts, understanding without acknowledgment. It’s how they hold each other’s secrets. It’s how they keep their own. She lets him keep his shirt. Knowing is not the same as witnessing.

His sleeves are drenched but his mudstained white collar is only spattered. So is his face. This is where she starts. She takes his head in one hand and a washcloth in the other and his eyes close willingly. Submissively, like tall grass yields to wind.

Face clean, she tries to roll up his sleeves. Settles for just nudging them back a bit. She turns on the tap and they listen to how the white noise of the streaming water drowns out the past dripping in blood that’s rushing in their ears, collecting in their eyes, swirling around their heads, their chests, their throats. Around the two of them, now. Heretics, not gods.

She pushes his hands under the stream and watches it seep into his sleeves. She soaps her own hands and then picks up his. Takes his hands between hers and rubs them together until they can’t tell anymore which fingers are whose but all of them are covered in pink foam. The cold water rinses it away and makes their joint hands look presentable.

She’s not aiming for presentable.

She finds a sponge and scrubs until his skin is raw. Then she turns on herself. Scrubs until all that was healed is broken, until memories well up in droplets, until she can recall the shape of the place he is in now. The shadows in the corners.

With both of them bleeding, she drops the sponge with a wet splat and turns off the tap. Silence echoes and Time reclaims its hold on them. Laps at their ankles, tugs at their hair. In a little while, they will concede, step back into their expected places, their predestined roles, let Time sweep them up and take them where it will.

In a little while, when they’ve split their Then from their Now and their You from their Me. When they’ve reweaved themselves, retold themselves their stories, and made themselves fit once again into bodies with borders, boundaries. Then, they will do that. For now, they ignore Time’s impatient insistence, as they sit, hands entangled, and let translucent orange drip into the sink slowly like secrets and like thunderclaps.

drip

_i forgive you_

drip 

_i forgive you_

drip 

_i forgive you_

The towels are soft as she wraps them around his hands, and they don’t show the stains of their misbehaviour because they know themselves well and bought them black.

The towels hold the things they don’t talk about.

He stands up, shoving the towel into her hands, and leaves her alone in the bathroom. Extricates himself from her line of sight with a gentle push against the door.

He might leave – the Vault isn’t locked now.

He might not.

She rests her head on her arms and doesn’t wonder.

He doesn’t leave. He walks in circles like his legs have a mind of their own and drags his fingers along the rough stone walls of his dubiously voluntary, restrictive former home. He walks in circles like his feet are trying to flee something and stares at the piano in the containment field. Reward, temptation, bribe. Apology? A way to assuage her guilt. A way to negotiate with his anger. He brushes his fingers through his wardrobe and wonders how he could breathe.

The bed is made because he didn’t use it. The bed is made because he made it. Made his bed, swept his floor, folded his clothes. Everything neat, tidy, put away. Looks good, doesn’t it, Doctor? Looks Good. Like Progress. A shared fantasy to indulge in. We were almost convincing, weren’t we? We almost convinced me. Wishful thinking, is what it was. _Hopeful_ thinking.

We _contained_ me, Doctor.

For a while.

But containment is pressure. The higher the pressure, the bigger the bang. Something had to give.

He stops next to the bed, slides his stinging fingers over the frame. Copper on copper. He puts his fingers in his mouth and does what he always does. Becomes an ourobouros. Consumes himself for the sake of survival. As the price of survival. You can kill parts of yourself and you can do it gleefully or you can do it mournfully, but you will do it ruthlessly either way. He has done both and he will do both again. He sucks the blood from his fingers and feels empty, decompressed.

The sound of the metal bedframe scraping across stone travels through the floor and walls and reverberates in her chest and head. She still doesn’t wonder.

When she eventually leaves the bathroom, she almost trips over one of his shoes. The other one lies sprawled a couple of meters away, like it’s been kicked out of the way. The clothes he was wearing are on the floor. The wardrobe overturned like the aftermath of a slow and silent explosion. The bed has been moved to a corner.

She finds him under there. Clean clothes, eyes closed, back against the wall in a position of such obvious familiarity that she feels a wave of shame at how little she’s tried to imagine what life in here was like for him. Oh, she knew. It’s why she made it bigger on the inside, added windows. But she hadn’t _imagined_ , not really. Not from minute to minute. Night to night.

Knowing is not the same as witnessing.

She looks at the door. Looks at the bed. A moment of consideration. Then she takes off her coat and unlaces her boots. Leaves them out here as she crawls under there with him. Slides backwards until her back meets his hands, crossed over his chest and he shocks away from her. She waits until she feels his arms relax against her and then she puts her feet up against the underside of the bed and stretches her legs. Squeezes him tight between her and the vault. Crushes him. Takes away his options.

There is nothing, for a moment. They float suspended between heartbeats, frozen in the amber of solid Time.

Then, he exhales. It shudders through her rib cage and she slowly fills her lungs. Breathing an example. His inhale is halting, full of starts and stops, pleading questions and despair.

She blinks and two warm tears make their way down her face to the floor. She closes her eyes and stretches her legs a bit more. She listens to him recall how to breathe, how to exist, how to be alive after destroying everything that made you.

No, not everything.

Nobody did this for her.

The tears manage to keep rolling down her face even with her eyes closed.

When he’s remembered what being a body is and their hearts beat in unison, he wriggles one of his arms out from where it’s pressed between them and finds her hand. Holds it with all the force she didn’t use. As demanding as she was forgiving. He presses his fingers into her raw skin with a deliberate regularity, shooting tiny flares of pain with every pinch.

(will you love me)

Her free hand covers his, cold and confining, tries to force him to stop.

(will you love me)

Resolute and merciless she pulls his hand away from her. His nails scratch her skin.

_(will you love me)_

She rolls out from under the bed, starts putting her boots back on. He scrambles after her when he hears her walking away, but she wasn’t walking to the door. She hasn’t left. She’s sitting at the piano.

He hides the way he stumbles. Turns tripping into skipping. Starts circling her. Falls into orbit. Wonders if planets ever resent their suns.

He walks in circles like he knows what his role is, like he’s playing it. Clear notes ringing out in the wake of his footsteps courtesy of her fumbling, searching fingers. New hands without callouses that nonetheless still hold the muscle memory of strings, not keys.

He picks up the shirt he was wearing when he died and throws it over the edge of the platform like an afterthought, cavalier. Like cleaning is beneath him but this mess is too. Her fingers jump and dance, slip off keys, drop notes jarringly. He takes her coat from the bed and blocks another segment of the containment field with it. Builds an illusion of control while she plays at humility.

She plays and pretends not to notice him as he drags around chairs and tables, dressers and nightstand. With every side of the containment field obstructed, he stops behind her and waits for her to acknowledge him, acknowledge how he's fenced her in. When she doesn't, he steps up on the platform and sits down next to her on the stool. She doesn’t move over. There’s already space for him.

He tries to play along with her but she keeps slipping up, so he puts his hands over hers, gently, and nudges her fingers just so. Just where he wants them to go. She lasts almost fifteen seconds before she squirms and takes her hands back, slips away, off the stool, from the platform. He jumps up as if struck by lightning, is out of the containment field before he realises what he’s doing.

They end up on opposite sides of the platform and stay that way. Walking slow circles around each other, sorting through shared but disparate memories as they reassemble themselves. Sharing their space but never their side. Submerged in the paradox of shared loneliness.

They run their hands through what they had, what they almost had, and watch it slip through their fingers like sand, like Time, relentless, unwilling to give them a second chance, indifferent to how willing they are. Second chances, third chances, fourth, fifth, as many as it takes. As many as it takes to get it right. To be who they are and on the same side.

They walk slow circles around each other.

After as much time as they need – no one will miss them, here in this place outside time – after they’ve remade themselves and she’s the Doctor and he’s the Master and she’s put on her coat and he a new jacket, they pause in front of the door and they look at each other.

The next time she sees him he’ll have a new outfit. The next time he sees her she’ll have some new friends. The next time they see each other they will play the parts that they’ve carved into the stars for themselves and they won’t speak of this. Won’t think of this. Won’t acknowledge this. This absence. This negative space within themselves. This open wound throbbing in time with four beating hearts.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out Missy’s device. Holds it out to him. He looks at it for a few long seconds, then takes it and puts it in his pocket. He looks up at her. In his eyes something like a question, or something like an answer. Something like a secret he holds up for her to see. She looks into his eyes and she nods. He turns around and leaves the Vault.

**Author's Note:**

> okay so as an exercise, because i tend to fall back on 'person looks at person' a lot when im trying to communicate feelings, i wanted to try and write something where none of the communication was being done through eyes and looking. and because 13 and dhawan!master communicate so much through their physicality, i wanted to explore them a little bit just through touch. 
> 
> i dont remember if i decided not to include dialogue or if that happened organically but it took me a while to realise there wasnt any, so i think there's a lot of communication happening anyway even without the dialogue. which i like because in 12x10 there's also a lot of conversations where basically the master is talking the entire time and you dont really realise that the doctor is barely saying anything because shes still responding and he's responding to her? anyway, this is that but neither talk. i think it works? i'd love to hear from an outside perspective though
> 
> sometimes when im writing i think about that quote by stephen king about how when a writer gets too enamoured with their ability to describe things, the reader gets bored? and then i ignore it. and cram some more symbolism in my poetry-like, grammatically-incoherent, entirely-too-long sentences.
> 
> the master is still in missy's clothes from 10x12 because im not dealing in plausibility tonight 
> 
> title is from here: https://context.reverso.net/vertaling/nederlands-engels/gedeelde+smart  
> which it isnt really of course, i was just looking up how 'gedeelde smart is halve smart' translates because it fit perfectly in the paragraph but it doesnt really work in english the same way. BUT i saw that first translation: 'I would extend invitation to your sister in hopes that we may find greater strength in the beating of two wounded hearts.' which is an incredible line. but when i click for more context i just get 'source: subtitles for film/tv' which is not helpful? so i have no idea where it comes from, but it's a great line so i stole it
> 
> was listening to son lux's album from 'the disappearance of eleanor rigby' while writing this. especially 'no fate awaits me' and 'let me follow', so if you wanna get a taste for the headspace i was in, thats it
> 
> please let me know what you thought! im really extra curious actually with this one, what the impression of this is from people who didnt write it, so comments would be very appreciated!


End file.
